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First, Take Your Hydrogen: Sam Hamilton's 'Apple Pie'
By Janet McAllisterJanet McAllister on Sam Hamilton’s latest film, which tries to spin science into art – and succeeds.

Pantograph Punch

Astronomer Carl Sagan once said: “If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.” With Apple Pie, artist Sam Hamilton adds: “And if you wish to invent, you must first imagine.”
An 80-minute paean to the imagined, invented systems through which we obtain (or perhaps create) knowledge, Apple Pie contains phantasmagorias ranging from the amusingly hokey to the mesmerising. A father and son shadow each other like earth and moon; someone sits in a loud field of tropical green and sun; superimposed naked figures are each bathed in a different primary-colour light

Hamilton relies on our habits of thought to produce some fun trickster effects. Someone stands, hovering in a gently rippling waterfall – in fact, he is floating in an ocean that has been tilted 90 degrees, but our gravity-reliant brains suggest otherwise. Hypnotic Saturnian rings fill the screen – in fact, the rings are the paths of stars filmed via a University of Oregon telescope (it’s a pity we only found out about this fascinating process during the screening Q&A).

Shot on 16mm film, Apple Pie’s pleasantly fuzzy images and occasional prog rock evoke a retro, even mystical feel – a messy vintage vibe. But Hamilton’s grasp of quantum physics is commendably firm. This is not the output of an artist pretending to be a scientist; instead, it is art inspired by science. Epistemology off-piste.

For instance, people in shaggy costumes run rings around each other on a grassy knoll – or rather, the shagsters run around matadors and intergalactic caryatids (it’s endearingly playful, deliberately silly). At first, I thought they represented planets revolving around stars, but they are actually sub-atomic particles performing a nuclear reaction. So, it turns out that some of the universe’s smallest waves/particles act like some of the largest celestial bodies. Or at least that’s how we schematise them. Solar systems can become atoms; just change the label on the diagram. Are we all part of a pseudo-fractal pattern: satellites spinning around a centre at different scales?

Apple Pie is ambivalent about such models. It seems to suggest that our attempt to view chaos as order is both necessary and doomed: necessary because schemas work locally and allow us to live and create; doomed because there is no ultimate, overall order. No one size fits all, so any one schema can be pushed too far.

The structure of the film exemplifies this ambivalence: it is separated into ten sections based on solar system bodies. Ten is such an ordered number; Pythagoras would be pleased. But, on the other hand, unlike the scientific schema, Apple Pie’s structure does not differentiate between the moon and the planets, and the film blithely misses out Uranus completely. The point? The scientific hierarchy of the solar system is not the only way of looking at our galactic neighbourhood. We use it because it’s helpful, but we made it up and we can always make up other categorisations, enlist other heavenly ontologies. (Hamilton indicated at the Q&A that Uranus just didn’t seem as important as some of the other solar system phenomena. Woe is thee, Uranus! Your unusual rings overlooked!)

Unsurprisingly, given that Hamilton has a considerable sound oeuvre, the soundtrack is a highlight; even over the credits we hear Amazon ambience recorded at inaudible frequencies and dialled down for our narrow ears. The initial voiceover is dense, demanding, and mostly unnecessary, but perhaps it’s there as much for its noise as for its meaning, and every so often a phrase breaks off the sheer wall of sound and makes sense: “fake furs of national borders”, for example. Hamilton is also uncompromising in his delivery of uncomfortably-pitched sound pulses and flickering light strobes, so that experiencing the film is even briefly, slightly physically painful. Energy is powerful, possibly dangerous – and, Hamilton seems to be saying, if you’re going to invent the universe, you need waves: here are some I prepared earlier.

In the rather opaque climatic Jupiter narrative, roles seem to be reversed in a cultural exchange. It is the ‘native’ who offers the briefcase and the Western hipster who offers the four phases of the moon in return (in the guise of yet more shaggy-clothed humanoids). I confess I could not create any further meaning to fit this exchange, but I did like the image of the universe-as-briefcase put into a mundane filing cabinet – and I liked the tension between this ignominious fate and Apple Pie’s next sequence: a requiem for destroyed museums and libraries; a lament, in other words, for filing cabinets of knowledge (and, as it happened, a ritual uncomplicated by any questioning of the institutions’ role as repositories of sometimes dangerous cultural and political power).

Overall, Apple Pie’s references and inspirations are wonderfully cacophonic: the pace borrows from Mau Dance’s living statues; there’s imagery from 2001: A Space Odyssey, and a recreation of the Isle of Man race from artist Matthew Barney’s Cremaster 4. But all the turbulence coalesces into at least one overarching theme: scientific knowledge doesn’t kill wonderment at the universe; it makes it stronger. Delicious.
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Sam Hamilton’s Cosmic Apple Pie
by John Hurrell

EYE CONTACT

Ostensibly a science film about quantum physics, the universe (or multiple universes) and ten stellar/planetary properties, but really an amusing series of visual riffs on astronomical structures using friends, bizarre costumes and sci-fi fantasies - mixed in with some New Age mysticism and eco consciousness, and lots of intense 16 mm film and great music.

This trailer and test sample (https://www.circuit.org.nz/film/apple-pie-trailer, https://vimeo.com/128985782) gives an accurate sense of the 70 minute film’s feel and propensity for multiple interpretation. Made in Aotearoa and Samoa, enigmatic and at times admirably uncompromising in its obliqueness, it seems to me there are three highlights:
One is a black and white scene with dramatic lighting and shadows, of two men, one older than the other, with the camera ‘orbiting’ around them. It could be about a teacher / pupil connection, a familial relationship, some collaborative research, or they could be lovers. With their eyes fixed on each other, and long shadows, it is a terrifically intense sequence.
Another is a sequence of three standing (but huddled) figures - sometimes naked, other times clothed - holding mirrors and bathed in garish green/red complementaries and blurry, as if in a 3D movie. The fact that 3D glasses are not provided is a highly ambiguous statement in itself, just as it would be if they were.
A third is a glorious series of images of the revolving night sky, time lapse photographs taken through a telescope. The resulting (very intricate) concentric circles seem like some Ralph Hotere paintings from 1968, but much finer, fuller, and even more rivetting.
Apple Pie (the title comes from a throw away quip about matter by Carl Sagan) is pretty dense in its juxtaposed tropes, and probably suits an art gallery environment as opposed to that of a picture theatre, so that it is a continuous loop you can easily re-explore. You need to be able to casually walk in and out of a highly experiential, sensual film like this, rather than sit in a theatre and cling to a linear progression that provides ‘scientific analysis’ and ‘authorial meaning.’ Okay…erm, maybe it is both. Worth checking out if you get the chance.

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NZ International Film Festival review: Apple PieBy Matthew Hutching
NewsHUB

Sam Hamilton is a multidisciplinary artist, so it's no surprise his feature-length experimental film, Apple Pie, is such a textured tapestry of image and sound.

The film is an absorbing, playful rumination on scientific patterns across our galaxy, from the atomic to the astronomical.
Dancers, colours, objects, music and field recordings in landscapes engage in a cosmology of relationships, based on the Carl Sagan quote: "If you wish to make apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe."
The film moves through several acts based on our planetary system, starting far away at Pluto, before jumping to the centre, the Sun.
As we watch a person, possibly Hamilton himself, stand before a beach cutting his own hair, a narrator describes galactic ideas in a highly technical jargon, before summarising: "The universe is like a teenager."
Apple Pie is shot on 16mm celluloid film in settings around Samoa and New Zealand, giving it a beautiful visual texture. The soundtrack pulses with electronic oscillations and melodies which blend into the natural island sounds of wind, water and wildlife.
I highly recommend it to those seeking to be mesmerised by a richly choreographed meditation on the molecular and infinite elements that make up the universe.

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Film Festival blog part two: happy days
By David Larsen @leaflemming · On July 20, 2016

Metro Magazine

Apple Pie. Experimental magnum opus from Kiwi artist Sam Hamilton, consisting of ten short segments reflecting on planets of the solar system. You make take “reflecting on” as shorthand for “doing weird visual shit in some tangential way related to”. Unlike anything else I’ve seen at this or any other festival, and worth going to for more reasons than that. Took me a little while to get into — the opening sections were not my favourite ones — but the later sections, especially those on Earth, Jupiter, and Saturn, were astonishing and wondrous. When reviewers call films “meditations” — “an intriguing meditation on existential angst” — we usually mean, “It has ideas! And I want to sound intelligent!” The experience of watching this film was closer to being an actual meditation than any I can remember.